MacNeice, (Frederick) Louis 1907-63
Northern Irish poet

Born in Belfast, he was educated at Marlborough and at Merton College, Oxford, and became a lecturer in classics at Birmingham (1930-36) and in Greek at Bedford College, University of London (1936-40). He was closely associated with the British left-wing poets of the 1930s, especially W H Auden, with whom he wrote Letters from Iceland (1937). Among his volumes of poetry are Blind Fireworks (1929), Autumn Journal (1938), Collected Poems (1949), Autumn Sequel (1954), and Eighty-Five Poems and Solstices (both 1961). He was the author of a novel, Round about Way (1932, under the pseudonym of Louis Malone), and several verse plays for radio, notably The Dark Tower (1947), as well as translations of Aeschylus and of Goethe's Faust. He also produced several volumes of literary criticism. A volume of autobiography, The Strings Are False, appeared posthumously in 1965, and his Collected Poems in 1966.